The education system in North Rhine-Westphalia constantly baffles me in my day-to-day work with my pupils. How do I write a summary? How about a commentary? We only had two lessons left before the next exam! We’ve had so many cancelled lessons! I don’t understand what my teacher wants! I hear this, or something similar, every day from pupils at a wide variety of grammar schools in Bonn who come to our school – mostly driven by intrinsic motivation – to acquire knowledge and skills outside school in order to get better marks. From my experience of now over 20 years working with pupils in Years 5 to 12, I see day in, day out just how superficially not only subject content but also methodological skills are dealt with in schools.
Most of my pupils are left in the lurch, not knowing what is actually expected of them. On top of that, those pupils who have not yet worked out exactly how their teacher wants them to phrase things are at a disadvantage and end up with marks well below their potential. So when the president of the German Teachers’ Association, referring to the latest PISA study from 2016, says that German pupils should once again be expected to perform better and that there should be less ‘cuddly teaching’, I am left speechless. My experience on the ground is quite different. Every day, I see anew that pupils are unsure about what they are supposed to be learning, how they should learn it, and what the purpose of it is. Every time there’s a change of teacher, there’s a disruption, because what Teacher XY wants is something Teacher Z absolutely does not want under any circumstances. In other words: the pupils who are best at guessing what their teacher wants – and, above all, how – and those who can quickly analyse, tactically and strategically, what makes their teacher tick, have the advantage. But surely that can’t be right! This is not a criticism of teachers and should not be taken as such, but it would be an enormous help to many secondary school pupils if teachers allowed them to take an active part in their own learning, if pupils were given more tools to help them, for example, to write a proper text analysis. Pupils are constantly wondering what is expected of them and, above all, in what form. When I then hear from pupils that their marking schemes are taken away from them after exams – meaning they have no opportunity to look closely at what they could have written differently or better – I am more than astonished. What is the point of marking an exam? Surely it is to ensure that the mistakes I made – both in terms of content and language – are not repeated in the next exam. As things stand, however, we are a long way from achieving this, especially when the marking scheme is withheld from them. I now mark every exam and go through the mistakes with the pupils, including marking errors. And this is where huge gaps become apparent – not only in terms of content and methodology, but above all in terms of language. And that is certainly not something to be overlooked in English lessons. As a native speaker, I’m truly amazed at what gets marked as wrong in the exams and what gets accepted as correct. When the next teacher comes along, the whole thing is turned on its head. What was right before is now wrong! And whatever a teacher doesn’t know in English (because very few teachers in schools in North Rhine-Westphalia are native speakers), they don’t want to know either! How are pupils supposed to make sense of it all? It’s just as well that I’ve now built up a large collection of exam papers and, together with my highly motivated pupils, can crack the ‘teacher’ system. My next post will be about intrinsic motivation and how I can foster it.
